Sherri Hodies, Supervisor of Elections for Monroe County, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about yesterday’s election.
Everything went quite smoothly with the election.
Hodies said, “Everything went wonderful. We had two of our associates from Key Largo come down, two associates from Key West came up and it was just a huge team effort. Just very excited about how well everything went.”
The percentage turnout was 29.76%.
Hodies said, “Of course, we always want more voter turnout than almost 30% but some of my colleagues had told me, if you get 18 to 20% you’re doing really good. So of course, we wanted more than that. If you look at 2019 and 2021, we’re a little bit higher. I mean, we were still at 29% in those two years, but we’re just a little bit higher. So I was happy to see that we were getting close to 30%.”
In Marathon City Council, Debra Struyf had 939 votes. Robyn Still, incumbent had 761 votes and Lynn Landry, the incumbent mayor had 719 votes and William David Perry had 683 votes.
Hodies said, “We really were watching the third and fourth place positions, because early on, they were very close, like only 10 or 11 votes apart, and right at that .05% but when it was all said and done, the percents widened, and we did not have to go to any type of a recount. So yes, I want to congratulate all of the candidates. It’s very hard to put yourself out there, as I know from a year ago, and by the way, it’s my one year anniversary of being voted in by the Monroe County voters today. So again, I just want to say thank you, and so honored and humbled to be in this position. So I just do want to give a shout out to Garrett and Lynn, William and Greg, Jeff and Robyn and Deborah. They did really well with their campaigns. Didn’t have a lot of questions or a lot of concerns or anything coming in. We had a couple, but nothing that couldn’t be be handled and talked through. So they ran good campaigns, and I’m just, I’m proud of every one of them, because I know how hard it is.”
Don’t forget to recycle the signs.
Hodies said, “They can take all of their campaign materials up to Long Key transfer station. You take those metal sticks out, put them in one recycling bin, put your corrugated signs in the other, and then any other kind of paperwork, brochures, any of that would go in the third bin. The corrugated signs, as we have been talking about, take 500 years to decompose. So please make sure that you get all of your candidate items to the recycling center. That’s Long Key transfer station. I just want to give a shout out to Greg Robinson. He emailed me yesterday, he said, look, I’m already recycling my stuff. He was already up at Long Key transfer station. Greg Robinson, thank you so much, and so the rest of the candidates, please get up there to the recycling area and encourage all of your neighbors to do the same. City of Marathon is going to join you by making sure any of the signs they’ve picked up that might not have been put out in the right spots, they’re going to also use that recycling area.”
Marathon First Baptist Church was pretty busy. They had the most voters participating at that precinct.
Hodies said, “That precinct is always very busy. And also, Kirk of the Keys is very busy. All the precincts did a great job. I visited every precinct three or four times. I was inside the precinct just checking on things, making sure things were going well, and we did some cross training just to make sure other folks within the SOEs office has seen the inside of a precinct, and can kind of cross train on the things that they get ready, and then they actually go to the precinct, and they can see how all of their hard work really pans out for the clerks and the inspectors that are in the precincts. Again, I just want to say to my 10 associates that work with me every day, they are awesome. If the voters in this county really understood what they are, they would never be worried again. These folks are gatekeepers. They’re not going to let anybody get away with anything. And then you have these election workers that have been trained by those same people, and they’re also gatekeepers. I saw people raising their hands with the clerk saying the oath of how important their job is. I just saw so many things that make me feel so comfortable and trust these elections so much down here. They are going right by the book and let me tell you something, these 10 associates have put together these books, and they know what can and will not be done. I’m just proud of all of them, I thank all my election workers, and just was proud of everyone and how well everything went. I also wanted to tell people to take a look at some of the videos that are out there, we actually went behind the scenes into the canvassing room. So there’s some pictures, video. If nobody’s been in the canvassing room, you can kind of see how we were opening up those vote by mails and so forth. Again, the public is invited to come to all of this, logic and accuracy testing, canvassing board, opening up the vote by mails. We’re really going to concentrate on that next year to make sure that the public knows transparency is important, but they need to show up so they can see the transparency.”
For more information, click here: https://www.votemonroeflkeys.gov/